151 posts categorized "Anti War libertarians"

07/27/2014

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the "Great War" – World War I. This is how the catastrophe unfolded:

So then, we have the following remarkable sequence of events that led inexorably to the 'Great War' - a name that had been touted even before the coming of the conflict.

Austria-Hungary, unsatisfied with Serbia's response to her ultimatum (which in the event was almost entirely placatory: however her jibbing over a couple of minor clauses gave Austria-Hungary her sought-after cue) declared war on Serbia on 28 July 1914.

Russia, bound by treaty to Serbia, announced mobilisation of its vast army in her defence, a slow process that would take around six weeks to complete.

Germany, allied to Austria-Hungary by treaty, viewed the Russian mobilisation as an act of war against Austria-Hungary, and after scant warning declared war on Russia on 1 August.

France, bound by treaty to Russia, found itself at war against Germany and, by extension, on Austria-Hungary following a German declaration on 3 August. Germany was swift in invading neutral Belgium so as to reach Paris by the shortest possible route.

Britain, allied to France by a more loosely worded treaty which placed a "moral obligation" upon her to defend France, declared war against Germany on 4 August. Her reason for entering the conflict lay in another direction: she was obligated to defend neutral Belgium by the terms of a 75-year old treaty. With Germany's invasion of Belgium on 4 August, and the Belgian King's appeal to Britain for assistance, Britain committed herself to Belgium's defence later that day. Like France, she was by extension also at war with Austria-Hungary.

With Britain's entry into the war, her colonies and dominions abroad variously offered military and financial assistance, and included Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and the Union of South Africa.

United States President Woodrow Wilson declared a U.S. policy of absolute neutrality, an official stance that would last until 1917 when Germany's policy of unrestricted submarine warfare - which seriously threatened America's commercial shipping (which was in any event almost entirely directed towards the Allies led by Britain and France) - forced the U.S. to finally enter the war on 6 April 1917.

Japan, honouring a military agreement with Britain, declared war on Germany on 23 August 1914. Two days later Austria-Hungary responded by declaring war on Japan.

Italy, although allied to both Germany and Austria-Hungary, was able to avoid entering the fray by citing a clause enabling it to evade its obligations to both. In short, Italy was committed to defend Germany and Austria-Hungary only in the event of a 'defensive' war; arguing that their actions were 'offensive' she declared instead a policy of neutrality. The following year, in May 1915, she finally joined the conflict by siding with the Allies against her two former allies.

Ralf Raico offers an excellent panoramic account of the origins of World War I.

As for economic causes and consequences, make sure to read this article in which David Stockman explains that

[...] the Great Depression was born in the extraordinary but unsustainable boom of 1914-1929 that was, in turn, an artificial and bloated project of the warfare and central banking branches of the state, not the free market. Nominal GDP, which had been deformed and bloated to $103 billion by 1929, contracted massively, dropping to only $56 billion by 1933.

Crucially, the overwhelming portion of this unprecedented contraction was in exports, inventories, fixed plant and durable goods—the very sectors that had been artificially hyped. These components declined by $33 billion during the four year contraction and accounted for fully 70 percent of the entire drop in nominal GDP.

So there was no mysterious loss of that Keynesian economic ether called “aggregate demand”, but only the inevitable shrinkage of a state induced boom. It was not the depression bottom of 1933 that was too low, but the wartime debt and speculation bloated peak in 1929 that had been unsustainably too high.

04/22/2014

I have predicted for quite some time that attacking and occupying Afghanistan is likely to meet support in Germany only as a matter of transient "political correctness".[...]

During the Nazi years, one could not observe broad sections of the German population demanding the killing of Jews - in fact, the Nazis knew that they would be going too far in disclosing or aggressively advertising the systematic extermination of Jews and, therefore, carefully hid the vile business from the public.

Today, it is easy to find support among the German public for the killing of certain sections of the Afghan population - just call them Taliban, and it will be deemed fine to take them out.

After all, German soldiers are over there for a "humanitarian" purpose - helping to support and stabilise (by bribery and other most dubious means) war lords and political coalitions in Kabul that on closer inspection betray, perhaps even more pronouncedly, the repugnant aspects implied in the term Taliban, a designation conveniently employed as a supposedly irrefutable all-purpose condemnation that must be accepted if one is not to commit the unspeakable sin of not being politically correct.

The media are largely silent about the actual circumstances of German collaboration in Afghanistan, portraying instead German involvement as a touching case of compassion and a generous act of bringing cultural advancement to savage tribes. [...]

"Humanitarian" aggression is not only the government line with regard to Afghanistan (and indeed other places), it is the position assumed by a growing industry of militarised charity. To my horror, I heard on the radio recently, a representative of CARITAS - a charity of the Roman Catholic church - demanding that German forces remain in Afghanistan to protect CARITAS in the pursuit of their various projects.

"They ran away," croaks the deputy police chief for the Kunduz province in his office and gestures dismissively. "They simply ran away. It was too soon."

"It was too soon. It was like an escape." One can hear almost exactly the same thing from the mouths of German soldiers, some of whom even compare the Bundeswehr's departure with that of the Americans from Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War. "If there is one thing the Bundeswehr is really good at, it's retreating," is a sentiment that can often be heard in the government quarter in Berlin these days.

What, though, did the Germans really manage to accomplish in Kunduz and what did the 25 Germans killed in the region die for? What did all the money buy? What remains of the mission? Berlin would rather not provide an answer to these questions: A complete evaluation of the Afghanistan engagement is not on the agenda.

12/10/2013

Kurt Schuler at Free Banking has an interesting article on the prehistory of Pearl Harbor:

Quite a few libertarians of my acquaintance have trouble thinking straight about World War II in the Pacific. The recent anniversary of Pearl Harbor brings them out with their arguments that U.S. government provoked the Japanese government into starting the war. Let’s review the facts, with a complementary glance at Japanese colonial monetary arrangements.

Japan emerged as an international power with the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5.

That is the background to Pearl Harbor. For more than 40 years Japan had pursued a policy of aggression and conquest. In each case it was the aggressor. As an island nation with a modern military it was [in] no real danger of invasion from neighboring countries. In the territories it invaded, Japanese forces murdered civilian opponents of its rule by the thousands and suppressed them by the millions.

The 1940 U.S embargo of certain materials frequently used for military purposes was intended to pressure Japan to stop its campaign of invasion and murder in China. The embargo was a peaceful response to violent actions. Japan could have stopped; it would have been the libertarian thing to do. For libertarians to claim that the embargo was a provocation is like saying that it is a provocation to refuse to sell bullets to a killer.

Then, in December 1941, came not just the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, but an attack on the whole of Southeast Asia: Hong Kong, Singapore, what is now Malaysia (British colonies), Indonesia (a Dutch colony), the Philippines (scheduled under American law to become independent in 1945), Thailand (independent). In 1942 there followed the invasion of Burma, a bit of India, and a few of the Aleutian Islands, plus the bombing of Darwin, Australia.

With that history in mind, how can anybody think that the United States could have made a durable peace with Japan? It would have lasted as long as would have been to Japan’s military advantage, no longer. Japan was hell-bent on conquest. Nothing since its emergence as a major international power suggested a limit to its ambitions. It only ceded in the face of superior force. Even as Allied forces retook territory, Japanese fanaticism was such that the government did not surrender until after the U.S. military dropped two atomic bombs. To ignore the long pattern of Japanese aggression as quite a few libertarians are wont to do is not just historically ignorant but dangerous, because it closes its eyes to the hard truth that some enemies are so implacable that the only choice is between fighting them and being subjugated by them. It took a prolonged U.S. military occupation to turn Japan from the aggressor it was to the peaceful country it has become.

08/30/2013

In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory, from a longer continuance of the war.

If oil were a serious consideration, the US would make an effort to keep
the region stable. The true concerns are clearly of a different nature:
distraction from domestic problems, boosting (presidential) popularity
by appeal to jingoism, keeping the industrial-military complex in
business.

In his excellent book The Great Deformation, David Stockman offers a fascinating background history of what I referred to as "keeping the industrial-military complex busy."

At the heart of the Reagan defense buildupwas a great
double shuffle. The war drums were sounding a strategic nuclear threat
that virtually imperiled American civilization. Yet the money was
actually being allocated to tanks, amphibious landing craft, close air
support helicopters, and a vast conventional armada of ships and
planes.

These weapons were of little use in the existing nuclear standoff,
but were well suited to imperialistic missions of invasion and
occupation. Ironically, therefore, the Reagan defense buildup was
justified by an Evil Empire that was rapidly fading but was eventually
used to launch elective wars against an Axis of Evil which didn’t even
exist.

08/28/2013

As for the oil meme, I can only repeat for the hundredth time that "war for oil" (in the context referred to by Wesley) does not make sense. If oil were a serious consideration, the US would make an effort to keep the region stable. The true concerns are clearly of a different nature: distratction from domestic problems, boosting (presidential) popularity by appeal to jingoism, keeping the industrial-military complex in business.

But the CIA documents, which sat almost entirely
unnoticed in a trove of declassified material at the National Archives
in College Park, Md., combined with exclusive interviews with former
intelligence officials, reveal new details about the depth of the United
States’ knowledge of how and when Iraq employed the deadly agents. They
show that senior U.S. officials were being regularly informed about the
scale of the nerve gas attacks. They are tantamount to an official
American admission of complicity in some of the most gruesome chemical
weapons attacks ever launched.

05/20/2013

OK, I have to admit that I'm an Adam Kokesh fan for lots of reasons, not the least of which is that we can't have a revolution without revolutionaries.

I realize that sometimes he does outrageous things that drive people away from the liberty movement, like this moment, right before he was forcefully removed from the 2008 Republican Convention:

And sometimes he organizes events that seem silly, like the Dance-In at the Jefferson Memorial:

But sometimes, his methods give us a glimpse of what we're up against and reveal what the government really thinks of us. This weekend is one of those times.

Adam was speaking at a marijauna legalization rally. While I think that drug laws should belong to the states, to be honest this isn't one of my issues and that's partly because it isn't a freedom that the traditional GOP voter is ready to embrace (yet).

But Adam wasn't smoking pot, he wasn't carrying pot, and he didn't organize the event. However,the police moved in on him when he was speaking, and he was arrested.

The Kokesh wing of the movement has been aflutter all weekend about it, and if you want to know more specifics, I suggest you visit his Facebook page or click ont of the links at the bottom of this entry because I want to focus on one small event that will likely go unnoticed, and it's in this video.

This officer is answering phones that are apparently ringing quite a bit as people call to check on the status of a quasi-celebrity. You won't need to listen long, I promise:

Who is the provacatuer again?

This is why I like and admire Adam. He never loses his cool, and his ability to do so exposes small bits of the arrogant power structures we're facing.

And in case you doubt the authenticity of the video, this is Part II, where the kid who recorded the call shows evidence in his favor:

02/16/2013

“There are people who call government an evil, although a necessary
evil. However, what is needed in order to attain a definite end must not
be called an evil in the moral connotation of the term. It is a means,
but not an evil. Government may even be called the most beneficial of
all earthly institutions as without it no peaceful human cooperation, no
civilization, and no moral life would be possible. In this sense the
apostle declared that ‘the powers that be are ordained of God.’”

(Mises, L. von. 2010 [1944]. Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War. Yale University Press, New Haven.)

There appear to be good theoretical grounds to suppose that the state, especially the modern state, has been a key factor in dramatically reducing violence amongst human beings.

02/09/2013

I remember my parents telling me that when we travelled in South Africa (in the 1960s), they had to make sure that the [native black] driver could stay with us, at friends or in the hotel or in some other safe place, as otherwise he was likely to get severely harmed or even killed by members of other tribes. This post may provide an explanation why my parents had to take such precautions.

Also, I hope it will give pause to those who think that it follows immediately from the many defects of the state that the remedy lies in a romantic conception of anarchy, where the state has disappeared and peace services are exclusively provided by individuals and the market. In the sequel to this two-part-post "Prosperity and Violence", I am going to endeavour to show that

in the process of development, the nature of coercion alters. Rather than being privately provided, it instead becomes publicly provisioned. And rather than providing a means for engaging in costly acts of retribution, it becomes a means for promoting the creation of wealth. (p.50)

Below I try to reconstruct from excerpts some of the narrative - especially on the role of violence in societal development - contained in a great book of only 144 pages: "Prosperity and Violence" by Robert T. Bates. It offers an amazingly incisive and insightful comparison of the paths of development of rich Western societies, on one hand, and countries of the Third World, on the other.

Karl Polanyi refers to the transition from village to city, and from agriculture to industry as "the great transformation [...] (p.20)

As I shall show, kin relations provide insufficient assurance [...] to motivate the formation of the kinds of capital necessary for an industrial society. The assurance kinship provides, moreover, comes at a high cost. Analysis of these costs helps us to understand why it is not societies governed by kinship, but rather societies governed by states, that secure the great transformation. (p.22)

Bates goes on to analyse two vital aspects of development:

[...] the decision to form capital and the formation of institutions that render it rational to do so. (p.22)

He explains:

In agrarian societies, families organize production, consumption, and the accumulation of wealth [...] They also manage power. Not only daily life but also affairs of state flow through the networks spun by birth, marriage, and descent.(p.30)

However, people in pre-industrial societies

[...] cannot shed risk by transacting in markets. Instead, they must directly bear the costs of uncertainty; they must self-insure. Two of the most obvious ways in which they do so is by making "conservative" decisions and by failing to specialize. (p.38)

That is:

[T]hey grow crops that while offering a smaller harvest, nonetheless offer one that is more certain [... They] remain subsistence producers. They are reluctant to plant pure stands of maize or wheat or to specialize in cash crops. [...] The costs in terms of the diminution of income yield, however, the benefit of increased security. It secures the peace of mind that comes from decreased risk in the face of a hostile nature. [...] That property rights inhere in families, rather than in individuals, renders families a means of insurance. [...] [M]embers [of the highly extended and geographically diversified family] can exercise the right to a share of the property of other relatives to ensure themselves against risk. [...] The dispersed location of the family estate yields a diversified portfolio of income-generating assets, thus reducing the level of risk. (p.41)

By the same token:

Just as families and kin groups self-insure against the risks of nature, so too do they self-insure against risks arising from the conduct of other human beings. Further constraining the economic performance of kinship societies is the nature of their political institutions. While offering a means for protecting property, the private provision of security by family and kin [...] also limits the accumulation of wealth. (p.42)

After all:

For deterrence to work, the threat of revenge must be credible. This system of governance requires, then, that men are warriors, capable of inflicting harm; it also requires that they be willing to retaliate, and be known to be willing to do so. (p.45)

There is a number of cultural practices that reinforce a sufficiently violent attitude:

In societies where families arm themselves and provide their own protection, military prowess lies embebbed in codes of honor, from which it derives credibility as a deterrent. (p.46)

Absent a reputation for being willing to fight, a person becomes vulnerable. Not only might his enemies view him as prey, but also his family and friends will scorn him, since their safety depends upon the support than can be expected from others. The incentives to fight thus run deep and once concord is lost, cycles of retaliation ensue. (p.47)

To be sure:

Private violence can work; it can produce peace. But the peace it produces is fragile. Once triggered, the system inflicts costs that mount over time: families span generations, and the wrongs of one generation cast a curse on the lives of those who succeed them.

To avoid the costs of private violence, people seek ways of insuring that retaliation will not be triggered. In so doing, they expose another defect of the private provision of security: in the face of the costs of the system, people may seek to increase their welfare by choosing to live in poverty.

Students of village societies emphasize the fear of envy. Others describe how those who become wealthy are subject to accusations of witchcraft and sorcery. In such societies, egalitarianism becomes a strategy in which persons forgo consumption for the sake of peaceful relations with neighbours. To forestall predation, they may simply choose to live without goods worth stealing. In such a setting poverty becomes the price of peace. (p.47)

In conclusion:

As kinship societies expand, families inhabit diverse terrains; they trade and, better insured against the risks of nature, they secure economic gains. But the nature of their political institutions imposes important limitations upon their well-being.

The security they supply to the producers and accumulators of wealth is fragile. It lies imbedded [sic] in a culture of provocation. And should threats that support the peace have to be acted upon, then the system produces desolation and grief.

The political institutions of kinship societies impose a cruel trade-off; peace on the one hand and prosperity on the other. (p. 47/48)